Freaklabs FL-AT86RF212-DEV User Manual
FreakLabs
Rapid Prototyping Platform
900 MHz 802.15.4 Radio Board
FL-AT86RF212-DEV v1.1
User Guide v1.1A
Document Revision History
Date Description
2010-04-01 Document creation
FL-AT86RF212-DEV v1.1
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Specications
e FreakLabs FL-AT86RF212-DEV 900MHz modular radio board is
designed to be an easy way to rapidly prototype wireless sensor/actuator
applications using the 900 MHz IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. It includes
a complete radio circuit based on the Atmel AT86RF212 as well as a
standard FreakLabs universal serial peripheral connector and either an
external RP-SMA antenna connector or an on-board SMD antenna.
Quick SpecS
Radio: AT86RF212,
900 MHz, 802.15.4
radio
It’s designed to work with MCU boards that support the standardized
FreakLabs Universal Serial Connector and has a peripheral-side, right
angle, male connector that ts into any of the FreakLabs MCU boards.
It is also supported by the Chibi open source wireless protocol stack for
quick and easy wireless communication and testing.
Connectors: 1 USC
Peripheral
Antenna: RP-SMA
external antenna,
SMD antenna
Peripherals
e transceiver is the only peripheral on this board and it consists of the Atmel AT86RF212 900
MHz 802.15.4 radio. e AT86RF212 has a lot of built-in hardware to handle many of the time
sensitive or repetitive tasks in the 802.15.4 specication such as automatic ACK generation, frame
ltering based on address, auto-CRC generation and checking, automatic retries, and auto transmit after checking for a clear channel.
Some other nice features of the radio are that it supports the Chinese 780 MHz, European 868
MHz, and North American 916 MHz bands. ere are also dierent modulation schemes that
can be chosen based on requirements. e highest bitrates use O-QPSK modulation which can
handle up to 1 Mbps data rates in proprietary mode or 250 kbps in IEEE 802.15.4 compliant
mode. e modulation can also be changed to BPSK which yields approximately 5-10x improvement in receiver sensitivity and thus greater range. However using BPSK, the data rate goes down
to 20-40 kbps.
e RF front end consists of a matching circuit to match the radio data signals to the 50 ohm
antenna connector and optional discrete components to choose between the on-board SMD antenna and the external RP-SMA antenna connector. e components in the matching circuit are
chosen and tested to be as close as possible to 50 ohms so that there will be very little power loss
on the incoming and outgoing data signals.
Connectors
e universal serial connector (USC) interface is standard for all of the FreakLabs development
boards. e FL-AT86RF212-DEV board contains a peripheral-side universal serial connector.
Universal Serial Connector Pinouts
e FL-AT86RF212-DEV radio board supports the Universal Serial Connector (USC) v1.1. e
FL-AT86RF212-DEV v1.1
FL-AT86RF212-DEV v1.1
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